Ferrari had ‘clumsy’ Canadian GP says Nico Rosberg as F1 team admit ‘too many mistakes’ made in Montreal | F1 News

Nico Rosberg believes Ferrari’s “clumsy” Canadian Grand Prix weekend summed up their disappointing season so far.

Ferrari drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton finished fifth and sixth respectively in Montreal as the team slipped back to third in the Constructors’ Championship behind Mercedes, who claimed an impressive one-three result.

There were again sporadic flashes of strong speed from Ferrari’s SF-25, particularly from Leclerc – but the Monegasque missed all of Friday’s second practice after crashing in the day’s first session and then made an error on his final lap of qualifying just after setting the quickest first sector time of all.

Hamilton’s Sunday, meanwhile, was compromised after his car sustained damage when it struck a groundhog on lap 13.

Reflecting on the Scuderia’s frustrating weekend on the latest edition of The F1 Show, 2016 world champion Rosberg said: “We’ve got to remember that Charles Leclerc was quick at times in the race.

“He was very quick; he was keeping up with the McLarens very nicely. He was quick in qualifying. Some say he could have been top three in qualifying, right up there with the others.

“I think they also did a wrong tyre choice in qualifying [by not running the medium tyre in Q3].

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“So a lot of strategy mistakes there because then also in the race they stopped Lewis into a bunch of traffic which lost him loads of race time.

“They also had a free opportunity to try and a one-stop with Charles. It was a free opportunity but they didn’t try to do it.

“Behind there was just Lewis and loads of space, there was just nobody there, and they could have taken a shot at it and left him out on that first stint in the first place because he was going strong and they just pulled him in early. He was also a bit annoyed about it because he wanted to stay out longer.”

Rosberg added: “So it was a bit of a clumsy weekend from Ferrari.

“Then also bad luck with the groundhog. So it all came together, which is not good.

“It’s like the story of their year so far, isn’t it? It just keeps on going like that, it’s a tough one for them.”

Vasseur on Ferrari’s mistakes and a ‘good lesson from Mercedes’

Mercedes’ triumph in Montreal means Ferrari are now the only one of F1’s big four teams without a Grand Prix victory approaching the half-way mark of the 24-race season, with three podium finishes for Leclerc their best Sunday results so far.

Team boss Frederic Vasseur – who came into the weekend under the spotlight after reports in prominent sections of the Italian media claiming that his position was under threat – admitted they simply “made too many mistakes” to finish higher.

But he said Mercedes’ sudden return to the front showed them what is possible to achieve.

“We showed moments where we were on the pace,” he said.

“I think we made too many mistakes collectively from the beginning, with the crash in FP1, the mistake in qualy, with the marmot in the race. In the end, the fight is so tight, that you can change the position for almost nothing from one weekend to another one.

“It’s a good lesson from Mercedes. They were nowhere the last three weekends and they were able to have two cars on the podium this weekend.

“I’m not sure that they completely changed the car, it’s more that from the beginning of the weekend, from lap one on Friday morning they were there. They did a good job with the preparation. This weekend, for different reasons, the focus was not always there.”

Insisting the “main issue is to do a good usage of the tyres” in order to achieve a strong result on any given weekend, Vasseur added: “If we want to achieve, if we want to start from the first rows and to have a clean weekend, as [in] Monaco, we need to do a very smooth weekend in terms of execution and it’s where we failed massively in Canada,”

And on their decision not to pursue a one-stop strategy with Leclerc, Vasseur said: “I discussed with Charles after the race. Where he is right is that we had not that much to lose when you are behind the pack and we can take some risk, but it was, for us, a bit too optimistic to do one stint of 50 laps with the hard [tyre] in terms of life first before performance.

“We were also probably missing some laps during the weekend to estimate it.”

Next up for the 2025 Formula 1 season is a return to Europe for the Austrian Grand Prix, which is live on Sky Sports F1 from June 27-29. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime.